DBMS Data Recovery

Crash Recovery

Though we are living in highly technologically advanced era where hundreds of satellite monitor the earth and at every second billions of people are connected through information technology, failure is expected but not every time acceptable.

DBMS is highly complex system with hundreds of transactions being executed every second. Availability of DBMS depends on its complex architecture and underlying hardware or system software. If it fails or crashes amid transactions being executed, it is expected that the system would follow some sort of algorithm or techniques to recover from crashes or failures.

Failure Classification

To see where the problem has occurred we generalize the failure into various categories, as follows:

Transaction failure

When a transaction is failed to execute or it reaches a point after which it cannot be completed successfully it has to abort. This is called transaction failure. Where only few transaction or process are hurt.

Reason for transaction failure could be:

Logical errors: where a transaction cannot complete because of it has some code error or any internal error condition

System errors: where the database system itself terminates an active transaction because DBMS is not able to execute it or it has to stop because of some system condition. For example, in case of deadlock or resource unavailability systems aborts an active transaction.

System crash

There are problems, which are external to the system, which may cause the system to stop abruptly and cause the system to crash. For example interruption in power supply, failure of underlying hardware or software failure.

Examples may include operating system errors.

Disk failure:

In early days of technology evolution, it was a common problem where hard disk drives or storage drives used to fail frequently.

Disk failures include formation of bad sectors, unreachability to the disk, disk head crash or any other failure, which destroys all or part of disk storage

Storage Structure

We have already described storage system here. In brief, the storage structure can be divided in various categories:

Volatile storage: As name suggests, this storage does not survive system crashes and mostly placed very closed to CPU by embedding them onto the chipset itself for examples: main memory, cache memory. They are fast but can store a small amount of information.

Nonvolatile storage: These memories are made to survive system crashes. They are huge in data storage capacity but slower in accessibility. Examples may include, hard disks, magnetic tapes, flash memory, non-volatile (battery backed up) RAM.

Recovery and Atomicity

When a system crashes, it many have several transactions being executed and various files opened for them to modifying data items. As we know that transactions are made of various operations, which are atomic in nature. But according to ACID properties of DBMS, atomicity of transactions as a whole must be maintained that is, either all operations are executed or none.

When DBMS recovers from a crash it should maintain the following:

It should check the states of all transactions, which were being executed.

A transaction may be in the middle of some operation; DBMS must ensure the atomicity of transaction in this case.

It should check whether the transaction can be completed now or needs to be rolled back.

No transactions would be allowed to left DBMS in inconsistent state.

There are two types of techniques, which can help DBMS in recovering as well as maintaining the atomicity of transaction:

Maintaining the logs of each transaction, and writing them onto some stable storage before actually modifying the database.

Maintaining shadow paging, where are the changes are done on a volatile memory and later the actual database is updated.

Log-Based Recovery

Log is a sequence of records, which maintains the records of actions performed by a transaction. It is important that the logs are written prior to actual modification and stored on a stable storage media, which is failsafe.

Log based recovery works as follows:

The log file is kept on stable storage media

When a transaction enters the system and starts execution, it writes a log about it

<Tn, Start>

When the transaction modifies an item X, it write logs as follows:

<Tn, X, V1, V2>

It reads Tn has changed the value of X, from V1 to V2.

When transaction finishes, it logs:

<Tn, commit>

Database can be modified using two approaches:

Deferred database modification: All logs are written on to the stable storage and database is updated when transaction commits.

Immediate database modification: Each log follows an actual database modification. That is, database is modified immediately after every operation.

Recovery with concurrent transactions

When more than one transactions are being executed in parallel, the logs are interleaved. At the time of recovery it would become hard for recovery system to backtrack all logs, and then start recovering. To ease this situation most modern DBMS use the concept of 'checkpoints'.

Checkpoint

Keeping and maintaining logs in real time and in real environment may fill out all the memory space available in the system. At time passes log file may be too big to be handled at all. Checkpoint is a mechanism where all the previous logs are removed from the system and stored permanently in storage disk. Checkpoint declares a point before which the DBMS was in consistent state and all the transactions were committed.

Recovery

When system with concurrent transaction crashes and recovers, it does behave in the following manner:

[Image: Recovery with concurrent transactions]

The recovery system reads the logs backwards from the end to the last Checkpoint.

It maintains two lists, undo-list and redo-list.

If the recovery system sees a log with <Tn, Start> and <Tn, Commit> or just <Tn, Commit>, it puts the transaction in redo-list.

If the recovery system sees a log with <Tn, Start> but no commit or abort log found, it puts the transaction in undo-list.

All transactions in undo-list are then undone and their logs are removed. All transaction in redo-list, their previous logs are removed and then redone again and log saved.